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The Forum > Article Comments > John Howard's foreign aid package not enough > Comments

John Howard's foreign aid package not enough : Comments

By Nick Coatsworth, published 20/9/2005

Nicholas Coatsworth says that John Howard's approach to foreign aid is not generous enough.

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Nick Coatsworth returned from the Congo earlier this year with some sense of hope. I don't know why. He would have emerged from a society which is functionally desperate by any indicators applying in Australlian society. Indicators numerous and well known to all who watch news bulletins and have concern.
While we in socially-progressive Australia seem to have difficulties in achieving adequacy of education, training, and health care for our children, with an average of 1.7 children per woman, how reasonable were Coatsworth's hopes for the Congo? A place where each of its women, the prime providers for children, has to stretch her inadequate resources over four times the number that are dependent upon her better-served Australian counterpart.
What hope, when almost half of the population are below, or just reaching, 15 - about the age of puberty? How can the administration of such a country arrange adequate governance with such a proportion of dependents, whether they are the mothers or the children themselves? How, when they are demonstrably failing to cope presently, might they be expected to cope better while the present mix of population is unlikely to rapidly change; nor being given assistance to change, or minimise increase; while they are on target to double in just one more generation?
How blind, a putative Master of International Public Health with a humanitarian focus, to author an article on such a distressing subject - yet fail to give any mention to the factor of population pressure and its continuing increase. No acknowledgement at all of its recognition by the international conference in Cairo in 1994, nor the massive resiling from responsibilities taken on there: Responsibilities to assist developing nations to contain their own populations within numbers for which they could provide.
Was it blindness, or some perverse pleasure in ensuring a continuance of need for the practice of triage?
Posted by colinsett, Wednesday, 28 September 2005 11:09:08 AM
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Let us ask; "why can't Australia" make progress on it own under-developed infrastructure. Be it the "chaos" within the TAX system or on the obvious socio-economic issues that are associated with uneven development indices, as a result of having an unequally distribution of national wealth. The strain, of not facing the predicament, will mean we transfer the problem over decades, to future generaltions, at home and abroad.

Why are we allowing governments to rip the guts out of community?

Why are we not able to embrace openly the knowledge we have about the changing population trends, and build a reciprocal socio-economic and cultural framework, that is inclusive of all civilians? One that encourages gain from - building capacity round livelihood indices, to counter-act the deficiencies, which presently point us, to the causal elements of increasing social ill, and add (a clumsy) burden to the budget deficit .

I see the problem is not a lack of knowledge, it is about attitude, about who we are among ourselves, (our values and beliefs) as a nation of people, and who we are as a nation in relation to other nations, on issue of "collective responsiblities" of "moral obligation" - and governance? (Local, State,National and International organisation!)

I do not believe that we can not solve our own problems in Australia, and I do not believe we can not help solve the problems of starvation, corruptions, Vat Tax and debt interest and market chaos overseas.

I believe the problem is technical. The need is hampered by the denial to address need, be it on our own door step or abroad
Posted by miacat, Thursday, 29 September 2005 10:22:20 AM
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